Munition designers and packaging engineers have been continually in search of a practical and economical method for measuring and recording the stress factors placed upon the different pieces of munitions as they are transported under various environmental conditions to their site of storage and use. The inability to obtain accurate environmental field strain data on a projectile has been a problem for many years. Reliable environmental stress data is required to enable packaging engineers to realistically specify design performance and packing standards. The absence of environmental data feedback frequently results in overdesigned more costly munitions and equipment and overstated packaging requirements. In some instances production rejects and increasing costs are attributable to unnecessarily demanding test procedures. As a result of the aforementioned problems the overall cost effectiveness of munition programs are frequently reduced. Generally in order to introduce a safety factor in munition design the specifications are based on results of simulated "worst case" laboratory tests. The aforementioned "worst case" evaluation technique assumes transportation and handling conditions not generally prevalent and is, therefore, not a completely satisfactory solution to the designer's problem of properly balancing safety and cost. Installing prior art strain instrumentation devices to check the effects of shock and vibration forces on large quantities of shells during their transportation has been found to be impracticable.
In summary the prior art systems or techniques for determining the stress that a munition sees in transport has been found to be unsatisfactory. Large scale sampling to acquire statistical data is not generally practical because of the cost involved therein. In additon frequently the acquired data requires costly reduction processing. Prior art instrumentation packages could not function for extended periods because of excessive power consumption. Because of the fragile nature of the prior art instrumentation package it usually could not survive the test stress environment. Because of the configuration of the prior art instrumentation package it usually could not be secreted within the host item in order to insure against special handling and the subsequent acquisition of unbiased data. The prior art test procedure was frequently unrealistic. Laboratory tests generally simulate only the most severe conditions and fail to duplicate actual transportation environment.